[Reader-list] Fwd: My review of Jaswant's Book in Outlook (internet)

[Ravikant]

Seriously funny! Enjoy. 

ravikant

 ----------  आगे भेजे गए संदेश  ----------

Subject: My review of Jaswant's Book in Outlook (internet)
Date: रविवार 13 सितम्बर 2009 11:30
From: C M Naim <cmnaim at sbcglobal.net>

        Controversy: Psuedo-Scholarship
     

 Jaswant Singh's controversial book on Jinnah has nothing new to offer, except
some rare photographs. It is significant only because it rudely and
perhaps unexpectedly exposed the tussles within the top ranks of the
BJP leadership.


                    C.M. Naim

Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence
By By Jaswant Singh
Rupa | 688 pages | Rs 695

With due apology to every Pathan in the world, I must start with a "Pathan"
joke. A Pathan came down into the plains to visit with a friend. The
friend treated him to qalaqand. The Pathan loved the chunky,
grey-white sweet so much that the next day he went looking for it in
the market. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember the name, and so when he
saw a man selling what looked like qalaqand, he pointed to it
and bought some. As he started eating he found himself in terrible
agony, for what he had bought was home-made soap. Seeing his anguished
look and the foam trickling out of his mouth, a man asked, “What’s the
matter, Khan? What are you eating?” Gasping for breath, the Pathan
retorted, “What do you think? Khan is eating his money.” 
That describes my experience with Jaswant Singh’s tome Jinnah: India –
 Partition – Independence (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2009). I spent 695 good
 rupees and
therefore felt I had to get my money’s worth. However, after a couple
of attempts to read the book serially, I decided to cut my losses. I
began to read the book in patches—50 pages here, 10 pages there, often
letting the book fall open and then reading whatever fate dictated. I
feel no shame in saying that the responses I offer below are based only
on a partial reading, and resolutely subjective.  
My first response: it is an embarrassing book
to read. I felt foolish when I found myself trudging through such awful
expository prose as this: 

“The League had claimed that it was the true upholder of Islam’s
ideological authenticity; also of representing a substantive Muslim
consensus, therefore, it demanded, rather presupposed, just a single
Muslim medium – and asserting its identity as a different conceptual
‘nation’, claimed a separate land for itself which is why this
agonizing question continues to grate against our sensibilities:
‘Separate’ from what?”

Yes, it actually is a single sentence on page 5. As is this on page 50:

“By this time Jinnah had been a Congressman of the Pherozeshah Mehta
group, (the moderate group of the Congress, which amongst others
included Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and their group
included Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lal (sic) Lajpat Rai, and also,
secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji who was presiding over the Calcutta
Congress.”

Things don’t improve as the book progresses. Here is one gem of a sentence
 from page 479:

“For one, such an assertion—[Muslims are a separate nation]—though
entirely illogical, is fundamentally of an insatiable nature, it will
always remain so, forever, as it never can be quenched being born of a
peculiar Indian phenomenon ‘minoritism’, endlessly it will continue to
give birth to more destructive minoritism, being politically contagious
for, Pakistan is doubtless Muslim, but ‘theocentrically’, it is not a
‘theocratic’ state, indeed there is no such state other (sic) perhaps
than the Vatican, but then who, other than Gandhi and a few others was
to advise caution as we rushed headlong (and unheeding!) down this
destructive path.”

While I prefer simplicity and lucidity in any expository prose I’m
made to read, I readily confess to being a pedant when it comes to
scholarly books. I expect them to fully employ standard scholarly tools
and methods—in particular when quoting from other sources. For that
reason I took particular interest in the book’s footnotes and endnotes,
and checked the quotations included in the main text as well as
elsewhere. The exercise was revealing. Mr. Singh’s research assistants
apparently felt no hesitation in borrowing verbatim from other people’s
writings and then presenting it to him as their own. Mr. Singh,
subsequently, compounded the “lapse” by letting everything appear as
the fruit of his own labours. I wrote on this matter in the Indian Express of
 September 1, 2009 and would like to share the relevant portions here:

1. On pages 481–2, there is a long (19 lines), erudite note on the
Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Besides being totally
irrelevant, it is a verbatim copy of a note available on the web.
The site belongs to the College of Arts and Sciences, University of
Alabama; the note is authored by its Department of Religious Studies.
2. On page 588, the long (34 lines), equally erudite note on Benedict
 Anderson and his book, Imagined Communities, is a meticulous copy of what is
 available on the web from The Nationalism Project. 3. Page 623 contains a
 note (20 lines) on the Muddiman Committee. It is copied word for word from
 the Banglapedia, prepared by the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.  The note is
 duplicated on page 630, unnoticed by the publishers. 4. On page 633, the
 author includes a note on Ramsay Macdonald; it
runs to 25 lines, faithfully copied from “British Friends of India,”
offered on the web by the Indian National Congress.
5. On pages 634–35, the author has presented a long note on A. K.
Fazlul Haq. Its 38 lines were originally written by someone for the Story of
 Pakistan project.

I reiterate: none of the above carries any indication that it was
not authored by Mr. Jaswant Singh or his research team. I stopped after
five searches, but I’m confident that more searches of the kind I did,
using key words or sentences, will turn up many more such examples.
The main text itself is full of similar lapses. Any number of
quotations is utilized, but their sources are not indicated in any
manner. Six lines are quoted from Al-Biruni’s book on page 16, but no
reference is given. On pages 21 and 22, the author quotes from the
trial record of Emperor Bahadur Shah, but fails to tell us where he
found it. On page 47, Mr. Singh mentions a Syed Mohammed Zauqi and a
letter he allegedly wrote to Jinnah in 1943. Mr. Singh writes, “In this
(sic) a rather detailed, but retrospective account is given of the
origins of the Simla Deputation and the formation of the Muslim League.
This is placed in the Appendix, for interest (sic) though its
authenticity cannot be vouchsafed.” The appendix runs from page 526 to
page 530. Neither the Appendix nor the main text mentions Mr. Singh’s
source or the reason why its authenticity cannot be vouchsafed.
I’m willing to allow that Mr. Singh or his publisher might not find
anything embarrassing in such silly passages as the following:

“[M.R.A. Baig] fell out with Jinnah over the Lahore Resolution which
he felt to be communal. He, then become (sic) Jinnah’s secretary…” (p.
275)
“Suddenly, Burma (now Myanmar) was now vulnerable, as was Rangoon, and then
 was it to be India?” (p. 291)

Most people, however, would find it worse than embarrassing having
to read a text so irresponsibly prepared. And yet the same is touted as
scholarship that allegedly required five years of writing, re-writing,
checking, and cross checking (p. xiii).  
My second response to the book is to call it
unneeded and irrelevant. It has nothing new to offer, except some rare
photographs. If one is interested in Jinnah as a person, Stanley
Wolpert (Jinnah of Pakistan) is presently our best guide. On the final years
 of Jinnah’s political life in undivided India, Ayesha Jalal (The Sole
 Spokesman) cannot be bettered. If one is more narrowly focused and wants to
 know how things went wrong in 1946, Abul Kalam Azad (India Wins Freedom)
 tells it all quite succinctly. For readable polemics, one can turn to Ram
 Manohar Lohia (Guilty Men of India’s Partition). As for finding a
 meticulously argued and documented single book on why the partition of India
 came about and who must take on what share of responsibility for it, one
 cannot find a better guide than H. M.
Seervai (Partition of India: Legend and Reality). Then there are
any number of review essays by that man of amazing memory and
erudition, A. G. Noorani, that have appeared over the years in Frontline
and elsewhere. Mr. Singh believes in an eternal unitary India that just
happens to have the same territorial boundaries as the areas of the
subcontinent over which the British held sovereignty in 1947, including
Andaman Islands, Leh and Ladakh, Sikkim, and Baluchistan. He also
believes that the main causes of the Partition were something called
the “minority syndrome” of the Muslims and the obduracy of a man named
Jawaharlal Nehru. These are good beliefs to hold for a self-defined
“political figure,” but they amount to nothing more. 
In his opening remarks (“Acknowledgments”), Mr. Singh states that on
a flight back from Pakistan he was struck by the thought “there existed
no biography of Jinnah written by a political figure from India. It was
then that I decided to fill the gap…. (p. xiii)”  The logic is
peculiar. His reason is not that he was personally fascinated by Jinnah
and wished to write a personal account of his life, nor is it that a
good biography of Jinnah did not presently exist. He simply believes
that some Indian “political figure” should have written Jinnah’s
biography, and since none did he must fill the gap. I’m open to
correction, but no Indian “political figure” as understood by Mr. Singh
has yet written a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru or Vallabhbhai Patel.
Does he intend to fill those gaps too?
Next, in the Introduction, Mr. Singh poses his big question: “Why
was this ancient entity [i.e. India] broken: Why? (p. 10)” Then he adds:

 “… unless we ourselves almost live in that period, and breathe
those contentions—[I don’t know how one breathes contentions.]—join in
the great debates of those years as participants…not merely be ex
post-facto narrators of events, or commentators upon past happenings—[I
have no idea how one can avoid commenting upon past happenings while
writing about the Partition.]—unless we do this very minimum we will
fail to capture the passions of those times. (p. 11)”

I’m afraid his utterly drab, often turgid and frequently rambling
narration fails to capture any passion of those times. How could it,
when it is entirely focused on the so-called big events and big names?
Much worse, in my view, is the absence of any sign of introspection,
any attempt to relate what he might believe to be the passions of those
long ago years to his own growth as a “political figure.” A more
personal book would have been much shorter and of genuine interest than
this depressing attempt at pseudo-scholarship.
My third and final response is to acknowledge
that it is a significant book, but the significance, in my view, lies
merely in its being a political epiphenomenon. It rudely and perhaps
unexpectedly exposed the tussles within the top ranks of the BJP
leadership. It became a handy tool for many of them to get rid of Mr.
Singh. What was personal animus could now conveniently be turned into
ideological difference. No history of the BJP will now be written
without mentioning this book and what it immediately brought about: the
expulsion of its author from the BJP.
Needless to say, the expulsion, as explained to the public, was
baseless. The leopard has not changed its spots. Mr Advani's former
aide Sudheendra Kulkarni has correctly written:
“Anyone who reads the entire book with an unprejudiced mind will
conclude that the charge that he went against the BJP’s ‘core ideology’
is bunkum… Actually, it adds ballast to many of the underpinnings of
the party’s nationalist ideology: its total rejection of the Two-Nation
theory, its rejection of ‘minoritism’, its concept of genuine
secularism.” Of course, Kulkarni does not mention that the book, while
rejecting the so-called “Two-Nation” theory fails to make any mention
of V. D. Savarkar, who as staunchly believed in it as Jinnah, and did
so prior to the latter’s conversion to it. [1]  An
introspective Jaswant Singh would have spent some time pondering over
the possible reasons why Savarkar and Jinnah shared that theory. That
would have been a new and valuable contribution. Mani Shankar Aiyar has
pointed out this matter forcefully in a recent review article in Outlook. He
 writes,

“. . . at Nagpur on August 15, 1943— . . . exactly four years before
Independence Day —Savarkar enthusiastically endorsed Jinnah’s claim to
Two Nations. Savarkar’s views spawned Hedgewar, Golwalkar and the RSS,
and animated the Hindu Mahasabha (besides eventually giving us first
the Jan Sangh and now the Bharatiya Janata Party). Here lie the Hindu
origins of Partition. . . Clearly, Jaswant Singh the scholar
embarrasses Jaswant Singh, lately of the BJP!”

Aiyar has also put his finger on what seems to be the single most
powerful drive behind the book, a disdain verging on hatred for
Jawaharlal Nehru. If that was deliberate—a ploy to diminish even
further the mild critique of Vallabhbhai Patel—it sadly failed to save
Mr. Singh’s fate in the BJP. On the other hand, given the role that the
RSS and its chief, Mohanrao Bhagwat, play in dictating the choices in
the party’s leadership, his fate in the BJP may not be quite sealed.
Mr. Bhagwat might have condemned the book but his condemnation was more
likely to tell Mr. Advani to make a graceful exit while he still had a
chance. The loudest and most persistent criticism of the book has come
from those whose own leadership positions are in serious jeopardy,
perople like Rajnath Singh and Sushma Swaraj. They were prominently not
invited to the latest conclave organized by the RSS, as reported in
today’s papers, but their critic, Arun Shourie, was. I also find it
significant that Murli Manohar Joshi and Atal Behari Vajpeyi have
abstained from condemning the book and its author. I, for one, can
imagine a future BJP to which Mr. Jaswant Singh would be of more
relevance and acceptance than is evident presently.
I am, however, not similarly sanguine about
the fate of Mr. Singh’s book in Pakistan. Sure, just as he has been a
hit with the ‘chatterati’ of Delhi so will he be—as he is now—with the
English language chatterati in Karachi and Islamabad when a Pakistani
edition comes out or the Indian edition becomes widely available. But I
won’t be surprised if a demand soon enough rises in the Urdu press to
have the book banned—for it questions the concept of Pakistan and the
motives of its founder. After all, there is a law on the books in
Pakistan against any such “blasphemy.” And many prominent Urdu
journalists might be expected to retort to Mr. Singh: “Nonsense.
Pakistan became inevitable the day Muhammad bin Qasim landed at Dabul.”
“Iqbal offered the vision of Pakistan and the Quaid transformed it into
reality,” that is the founding myth of Pakistan; it cannot accommodate
the possibility that Jinnah could have abandoned that vision in 1946.
“Congress was intransigent,” many in Pakistan would gladly concede,
but, disregarding the contradiction, the same will also assert in the
same breath: “Pakistan was inevitable.”
Some perceptive Pakistani commentators have already noted this problem. In
 the Daily Times of August 24, Ejaz Haider concluded his column on the book
 (“Jaswant’s Art of the Impossible”) by asking:

“So, what are we going to do? Praise him for implying that India
played a bad hand in East Pakistan and chide him for implying that
Kashmir’s boundaries should not be redrawn? Praise him for placing Mr
Jinnah on a higher pedestal that Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel and
reject his contention that partition was bad and didn’t solve anything?”

Compare it to what Muhammad Tahir wrote (“Mughalte” “False Conclusions”) on
 September 2 in the Nawa-i-Waqt:

“The Brahmin mind in India, by presenting Quaid-i-Azam as a
‘secular’ leader desires to remove the permanent existence of Pakistan
from the sacred security of the Two Nation theory. The latter is
inviolably linked with the existence of Muslims. Its purpose is not to
oppress or defeat some other nation but only to bring about the total
fulfillment of the religious, historical, and cultural needs of the
Muslims…. [The Quaid’s acceptance of the Mission plan in 1946] “was the
last nail he hammered into the coffin of the permanent overlordship of
the Hindus and partisanship of the British. He knew what to expect
[from both]. The separate state for the Muslims was a consequence of
his independent will; it is wrong to thing it was a result of his
disappointment.”

No, I am afraid, the reception in Pakistan may not turn out to be exactly
 what Mr. Singh’s Pakistani friends seem to anticipate

C.M. Naim is Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago
[1] I’m not claiming that Savarkar was the first
person. “Who was first?” is not the issue, unless one believes that
Savarkar had no mind of his own and only “reacted” to what others
wrote. As for those who mention Sir Syed and Iqbal with reference to
the “Two Nation” theory, they fail to note that Sir Syed, when using
the word qaum, did not mean a “nation-state”; for him the Muslims were a
 separate qaum, but then they too consisted of several separate qaums. Iqbal
 indeed talked in terms of nation-states, but it should be noted that in 1930
 he did not include Bengali Muslims in his scheme. His
vision of “a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state” was not the
same as the “separate states” of the Lahore Resolution of 1940. Please
see my 1979 essay Iqbal, Jinnah, and Pakistan: The Vision and the Reality



        http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?261816

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